


Taking Steps

by hybridempress



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Communication, F/F, Feelings, First Dates, Fluff, Nervousness, Post-Canon, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) Season 5 Spoilers, Spoilers, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:07:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24499150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hybridempress/pseuds/hybridempress
Summary: Catra has been doing her best to fit in with the other Etherians and learn how to be a person outside of the Horde. Part of that means learning how to be a girlfriend instead of a partner-in-crime, but she feels as though there are a lot of things she and Adora need to accept about their past before they can move forward. She tries to confront that conversation head-on by planning a rather sentimental first date for the two of them, but she's worried that Adora is going to be upset.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Mentions of Glimmer/Bow - Relationship
Comments: 5
Kudos: 93





	Taking Steps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SCP_113](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SCP_113/gifts).



One thing that Catra didn’t know if she was ever going to learn was not to bite off more than she could chew. Living in the Fright Zone all her life and being trained to either become the Horde’s war machine or die trying, Catra learned very quickly that she had to be twice as strong as the people around her and three times as smart. If she couldn’t be those things, she had to find a way to fake them. Especially when it came to Adora.

Still, Catra couldn’t say that she regretted developing those skills. They were still immensely beneficial to her even after leaving the Horde. Adora had had plenty of time to adjust to life in Etheria. She’d learned how to be kind, how to be brave, how to gain trust from other people, and how to live like a normal person. Catra didn’t really know how to do _any_ of those things, but she was a lot more quick-witted than Adora was. She could observe, she could follow, and she could mimic. She could fake it until she figured it out. Most of the time.

It was easy to fake-it-till-you-make-it in the grand scheme of things, but the smaller details of Etheria as a society were much more tender than Catra had been expecting, and much more intimate. It would be fine if she didn’t care about impressing the people around her, or if she wasn’t so terrified of losing it all, but the truth was that she wanted this more than she had ever wanted anything else in her life. That was saying a lot. 

There was also the itty bitty detail of her not having learned how to deal with embarrassment yet. Knowing on a theoretical level what a “date” is was _way_ different than actually trying to plan one. It didn’t matter that Adora hadn’t even conceptually understood what a date was until two days ago. The way her eyes lit up when Bow and Glimmer explained what a date was and suggested a _double date,_ of all things, was enough to tell Catra that this _needed_ to be perfect. If it wasn’t, it was going to be a stain on their relationship that lasted for eternity! Was it even possible for a couple to survive a bad first date?? Catra didn’t really know enough couples to have an estimate, but she was sure the statistics weren’t promising.

She wasn’t going to let their first date be a double date, either. As much as Adora clearly loved the idea, Catra didn’t want their first real romantic activity as a couple to involve anyone other than her and Adora. Catra was still a very private person. She liked Glimmer and Bow. She wanted to be best friends with them like Adora was. But she wasn’t ready to take that step yet. 

Besides, she was afraid that if Adora’s first experience with a date was to have other people there, she would never want to do _any_ coupley things with just the two of them. And that would suck. A lot.

Of course, in order to get them to drop the whole “double date” idea—at least for the time being—Catra had to tell Bow and Glimmer that she was planning a date of her own. She wasn’t sure if they had mistaken her awkwardness about confronting them as nervousness about taking Adora out or if they just _really_ liked to butt into other people’s romantic business, but they were adamant about helping Catra plan. She only had to refuse about a hundred times before they finally got off her back. Now, though, she was kind of wishing she hadn’t been so stubborn.

Catra loved Adora. That was something that had been true ever since she could remember, and would continue to be true for as long as she lived. But the fact of the matter was that Adora was a much different person now than she had been in the Horde. Catra was trying to get there, too, but there was a lot they didn’t know about each other anymore. They couldn’t steal a skiff and ride to forbidden rebellion lands or pull pranks on higher-ups anymore. Catra didn’t even really know what there was to do around here. She didn’t know how to find out without asking for help.

Then, it hit her. Honestly, she was terrified. She didn’t know if it would go well. She didn’t know if Adora would react to it the way Catra hoped she would. She didn’t know if Adora would think it was sweet that Catra was trying to be romantic and sentimental, if she would be bored and unimpressed, or if she would be sad or angry and think Catra to be insensitive. 

Despite everything, Catra wanted to hold onto their past. She didn’t think it was _all_ bad. She wanted to be able to talk about it with Adora and not be afraid that Adora would try to pretend like it didn’t happen. Honestly, she didn’t know if she could be with Adora if they couldn’t accept their past as part of them and look back on it together. Both the good times and the bad.

This was the best idea she had to gauge what Adora’s feelings were. It would either be the best date Catra could ever have planned or a relationship-destroying disaster, but Catra had only ever known how to deal with things in absolutes. Adora was going to have to take it or leave it until Catra could learn to see the colors between black and white. 

Catra also decided that she was going to make the whole thing a surprise. Depending on how Adora felt about the date in general, it being a surprise would either make her far happier or far angrier, but Catra figured that she was already taking a risk anyway. She might as well go all in.

“Come on, Catra, just give me a little hint,” Adora pleaded, following Catra as she wove and clawed her way through the leaves and branches of the Whispering Woods.

Catra rolled her eyes. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, I don’t know what to tell you, Adora.”

Adora sighed heavily but gave up trying to get any kind of information out of Catra. Adora couldn’t think of any reason why Catra would want to bring her all the way out here, especially in the middle of the night. There wasn’t much to do in the Whispering Woods except for getting lost. Even though the forest was quite tame these days, it still felt like the trees had been grown with the purpose of confusing people. 

When they finally reached their destination, though, everything clicked into place for Adora. Catra brushed away a few more branches and suddenly they came upon a small clearing with a picnic blanket laid out in it and a basket on top of the blanket. Adora instantly recognized it as the clearing where they had crashed their stolen skiff all that time ago. She could tell by the gash in the tree that they had crashed into, which still hadn’t healed itself just yet.

“Catra… what is this? What are we doing here…?” Adora asked. She was hesitant to step further into the clearing. She felt almost like she wasn’t supposed to be there.

“It’s a date. Duh,” Catra said, scampering to the picnic blanket and sitting down on it. She tried to speak with her normal condescending and carefree tone, but she was worried. It seemed like Adora was unhappy.

“A date…?” Adora asked. She supposed she should have guessed given the picnic that had been set up, but she’d only just figured out what a date was like two days ago, and she didn’t know that Catra had been planning one for the two of them. Still… “Why here?”

Catra shrugged. “I dunno. It’s the one place that I know around here and I thought it would be nice to like… have our first date in the place where this all started. Or whatever.” She averted her eyes. There was so much more she wanted to say, but there would be no point if Adora was angry about this.

“Oh. Oh,” Adora said. Catra could see out of the corner of her eye that Adora was blushing. She kept her eyes averted as Adora stepped gingerly into the clearing and sat on the blanket beside her. “That’s so… sweet of you, Catra. I didn’t think you really wanted to think about, well… how this all started.”

“Well, I do!” Catra said. It came out a bit more frustrated than she had intended. “I don’t want us to just pretend like that stuff never happened. I don’t think we’re ever going to be okay if we can’t… if we both can’t accept and talk about how we got here.”

Adora was taken aback. Catra was never this open and honest about her feelings, and she never wanted to accept when bad things happened to her. Adora was so, so proud of her. She was so proud of how much Catra had grown and how much she was trying to change, and Adora loved her all the more for it.

She draped an arm around Catra’s shoulder and pulled her in for a hug. “I agree, Catra. There’s a lot that we need to talk about. But we don’t have to do it all at once. We can take it just one conversation at a time. But right now, I think I just want to celebrate what we have now. That’s kind of the point of a first date… right?”

Catra smiled and rolled her eyes, but she curled closer to Adora and purred. “Yeah. I think we deserve a celebration.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! Taking a crack at some catradora fic today! Woooo! This was another request from a twitter mutual. They really wanted to see Catradora in my style, and I really liked the idea of Adora not having any idea what a date was, and Catra only vaguely having an idea but trying to plan one anyways. It ended up turning out a little more serious than I originally expected, but I liked it going in that direction anyways. I like the idea of Catra trying to confront her trauma and wanting to finally acknowledge the past, but not knowing how to go about it/not knowing if Adora feels the same way. I had a lot of fun with this fic, and I hope you guys enjoyed reading it. I always love to see comments from my readers, no matter how short or long they are <3 So please leave a comment if you enjoyed reading this, and if you'd like to find out how and when I take requests, you can follow me on twitter @hybrid_empress or on Instagram @hybridempresscosplays <3


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